https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXA vF9p8nmM >I know fro

File: 1336392605680.jpg (11KB, 244x299px) Image search: [Google]

11KB, 244x299px

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXAvF9p8nmM

>I know from clear memory that I would not want to re-experience some of those moments again with my own child; the anxiety, the illnesses, the exhaustion..but what wouldn't I give to be able to go back to some of those moments in more than memory? The pain is only made bearable, the sadness only made blessed by love and by art.

>Reading is a kind of doubled conciousness, existing somewhere between pure memory and lived experience. When we look at our own children, we see not only their current forms but all they have been before. In this kind of doubled perception, love and sadness are intertwined.

>The ruin in the landscape, or the textual ruin created by all of Tolkien's techniques catalyses this change, linking together the imagination, the current experience and recollection, intwining the past and the present with each other so that they are, in Aragorn's dying words, more than memory. More than memory transmutes the pain of exile, of separation and loss through the movement of time, the "Heimweh", into something still sad but now, as Tolkien says of the tears of the hobbits at their parting at the Grey Havens, blessed, without bitterness.

>The past is everywhere and yet at the same time out of reach, overlaid permanently by the present, worn away by time and change and even fallible memory. You don't have to wait a quarter century from the time of some of your most cherished memories to have this feeling, though such a gap certainly accentuates it. The price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings, says the song. Pain for the lost home is common to every human as we are separated from our childhoods, from our youths, from our first experiences.

>How do you read Tolkien? By paying attention to the ways that different features of his works combine to produce and transform sadness not into bitterness, but into something richer, greater, something fully human. Reading Tolkien this way you see the true scope of his achievement to touch the heart and you understand now much more fully how Sam's words "Well, I'm home." are both joyous and heartbreaking.

Thoughts?